Love Came Down

Introduction

My cousin in Edmonton adopted a young boy from Haiti. He and his wife have not had an easy time of it. Their son had been in an orphanage his whole life before coming into their home and he is having a very hard time bonding to them. His behaviour has been extremely challenging. One of the difficulties of adopting children from orphanages is that they often don’t know how to receive and give love and have a very difficult time attaching to loving people. They are desperately in need of love, but are seemingly not capable of handling it. And yet, if you would ask kids in an orphanage what they would most want, it would likely be a family where they could be loved.

People long to be loved. To be cherished. To know others deeply and be known by others. At times this longing for love gets broken because of past hurt and pain, but deep down it’s still there waiting to be rekindled. Where does this longing to be loved come from? As with all the good characteristics of our makeup, they come from God. We are creative because God is creative. We are relational because the Trinity is relational. When we are compassionate, we live up to his image. When we value truth and righteousness, we imitate him.

One of the core identities of God is that God is love. (read 1 John 4:16) “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” The apostle John is saying that love isn’t just an attribute of God like creativity, it is a defining core characteristic. So much so that he said God IS love. John was known as the apostle of love. He was constantly pointing out how we are to love others as God loved and loves us. How did John come to this conclusion that God is love? When I began studying for this sermon with love as it’s theme, I did a cursory reading of the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. As far as I know the word love is never used. The word save or salvation is used again and again. Worship happens. Angels are all over the place. Jesus is described as Son of the Most High, shepherd Immanuel and Messiah. The words joy and peace are there. But not love. I also don’t recall love being mentioned in any of the prophecies in the FT about Jesus.

So what do you do when you’re supposed to preach about love during Advent and none of the Christmas story even mentions the word? I turned to the Gospel of John and looked at what he said about the nativity. (read John 1:9, 14) No love, but if you keep going in John, you find out that the first time the apostle of love uses the word, it is in the most famous Bible verse of all, John 3:16. It is here in chapter three of John that we can begin to understand why John identified God as having the core characteristic of love. It’s not that John had no idea of God being loving before Jesus. God is described as having love all over the place in the FT. In Exodus 34:6, 7 God describes himself this way to Moses, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” The Psalmists repeatedly say “His love endures forever”. This self-description is repeated multiple times. God is described as loving Israel, as having Israel as his bride. John certainly would have understood God to be loving from the FT. However, there was something that moved John from understanding God as loving to understanding him as being love. That was Jesus. I could look at all kinds of teaching of Jesus as recorded in the gospels to affirm this, but this morning I’m going to stick to John 3. In this chapter we have the story of Jesus meeting with Nicodemus. The meeting takes place at night because Nicodemus had a lot to lose. He was a member of the Jewish ruling Council in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin. Nicodemus didn’t want to be publicly connected, as of yet, to a rabbi who intrigued him but who was already in the Sanhedrin’s bad books. So he meets him at night. He compliments Jesus on his teaching ministry and says he’s from God. Jesus gets right down the heart issues and challenges Nicodemus by saying that every person must become born again. Nicodemus is confused and Jesus explains that he’s talking about a spiritual rebirth by the Spirit of God. He ends his teaching by saying (read John 3:13-14). Then we read John 3:16 and following which most scholars believe are John’s theological reflections, not the words of Jesus.

What does John 3:16 mean? Let’s walk through it. Much of it is fairly straightforward.

God loved the world. In this case, world doesn’t refer to the physical earth, but to all the people who live on the earth. God loves everyone. Here’s how Alexander MacLaren put it, “When we think or feel anything about a great multitude of people, it is like looking at a forest. We do not see the trees, we see the whole wood. But that is not how God loves the world. Suppose I said that I loved the people in India, I should not mean by that that I had any feeling about any individual soul of all those . . . . millions, but only that I massed them all together; or made what people call a generalisation of them. But that is not the way in which God loves. He loves all because He loves each. And when we say, ‘God so loved the world,’ we have to break up the mass into its atoms, and to think of each atom as being an object of His love. . . . . Have you ever realised that when we say, ‘He loved the world,’ that really means, as far as each of us is concerned, He loves me? And just as the whole beams of the sun come pouring down into every eye of the crowd that is looking up to it, so the whole love of God pours down, not upon a multitude, an abstraction, a community, but upon every single soul that makes up that community. He loves us all because He loves us each. We shall never get all the good of that thought until we translate it, and lay it upon our hearts. It is all very well to say, ‘Ah yes! God is love,’ and it is all very well to say He loves ‘the world.’ But I will tell you what is a great deal better—to say—what Paul said—‘Who loved me and gave Himself for me.’” Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture: John 1–8 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2009), 181–182.

That he gave his one and only Son. During Advent and Christmas this is exactly what we are celebrating. God giving us the greatest gift of all, his Son. God didn’t have to give this gift. He did it because he loves us. I’ll speak more to that shortly.

Then comes the especially good news. “that whoever believes in him, shall not perish, but have eternal life.” There is an opportunity associated with God giving his one and only Son, the greatest gift. The second greatest gift, salvation through that Son. This is talked about in the nativity accounts. The angel that appeared to Joseph in a dream telling him that the child Mary was carrying was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit also told him, “you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Matthew 1:21. Salvation in this context isn’t about salvation from physical slavery, but from spiritual slavery. Slavery to our own sinful desires and slavery to the enemy of our souls, Satan. But it isn’t Satan that cuts us off from God, it is our own sin that cuts us off. Once we are reunited with God when our sin is wiped away, we receive eternal life. A life that will never end. And not just a never ending life, but a fulfilling real life.

Now I want to talk about the beginning of the verse. “God so loved the world, that he gave”. When most of us hear this line we tend to understand the word ‘so’ as speaking of the degree with which God loves us. In other words, God loves us so much that he gave us his Son. This is definitely a true statement, but it isn’t what the original Greek means. So isn’t a bad translation, it’s just that it has more than one meaning in English. The meaning true to the Greek word we easily discern in verse 14, and 15. (read John 3:14, 15) Here the word so doesn’t speak of how much but in what way. “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, in the same way the Son of Man must be lifted up.” John 3:16 should be read the same way, but what this also means is that it takes it’s meaning from Jesus’ words in the previous two verses. Here’s how commentator Colin G Kruse translates it, as I read it notice the parallels between vv14/15 and 16.

Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, in this way the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

For in this way God loved the world so that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Colin G. Kruse, John: An Introduction and Commentary, ed. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Second edition., vol. 4, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 2017), 123.

Do you catch the parallels between vv14/15 and 16? Jesus must be lifted up as the snake was lifted up. God loved the world by giving Jesus to us to be lifted up. Twice it is said, “That everyone who believes may have eternal life.” What John is trying to emphasize is that God gave the world Jesus to be lifted up on the cross so that we could have eternal life by believing in him. As I said at our seniors faspa, every person who is born dies. Jesus came to live a perfect human life, to love, teach, heal and cast out demons. To start a movement of people devoted to God. But he also came to die. And the gift of Jesus to us finds it’s ultimate fulfillment when he was lifted up so that we could live.

God is love and because he is love he gave his Son so that he could die for us and save us from our sins. Is there a ‘how much’? Yes, God loves us enough to give his son for us. Every one of us. In what way did God love us? By giving his Son to be lifted up for us. When we celebrate the gift of Jesus at Christmas, we are also celebrating the gift of the love of God manifested in the Son.

I titled my sermon, “Love Came Down”. God is love. That makes the very essence of Jesus also love. Love did come down.

So, what does this mean for us? In our every day lives?

Application

Would anyone ever say about me, “Darrell is love”. Likely not, and really they shouldn’t. I am definitely a mixed bag. The core of my nature isn’t love like God’s is. And yet, I would hope that the longer I am a follower of Jesus, that more and more of the character of God would become my character. That I would more and more reflect the character and very essence of God. How far are you on the way to having someone say your name and say that you are love? When you read the 1 letter of John to the early church it is very obvious that he believes that if we are a Christ follower we will become people of love. (read 1 John 4:7-12, 16-17) I could keep on going. 1 John is filled with verses like these. According to John, the one defining characteristic of a follower of Jesus is love and the one defining characteristic of a church is love. Paul captures this same idea in 1 Corinthians 13. (read). Faith, hope, truth, confession, right living, right theology all matter, they’re all important, but according to John and Paul, love is the most important. According to Jesus’ description of the last judgement in Matthew 25, how we treat others is the test of our faith.

How can we love as God loved us? Well, how did God love us in Jesus? God was willing to give up his Son for the good of all people. To reconcile them to himself through his lifted up Son. Jesus, was willing to give up all the glory of heaven and be born as a baby, experience all the hardship of our world and then suffer an unspeakably cruel death, for you and for me. in both cases, their love was measured by what they were willing to give up. In short, self-sacrifice. The test of our love isn’t our feelings for others, it’s the amount we’re willing to sacrifice for others. Years ago at a Missions Fest in Winnipeg I heard Ryan Rempel of Give The Word talk about how to gain a hearing with nonbelievers so that he would have a chance to share the good news of Jesus. He said that he re-examined the gospels to see how Jesus did that. What he discovered was both profoundly simple and challenging. If you will sacrifice your time, your money and your effort for others, you will have opportunity to share about the hope that you have in you. What are we willing to give up for others? What kind of sacrifices are we willing to make? Especially for those who can’t or won’t pay us back? Love is costly. Just ask God the Father and Jesus.

In this season of celebrating the ultimate gift, let’s not forget to give as God did.

Pray

Benediction: 1 Thessalonians 3:12a, 13